A case study of Nevada DMV system

Journal of the Academy of Business and Economics, March, 2004 by Ook Lee

ABSTRACT

If an information system serves a large population, any delays or poor quality in the service can be a politically sensitive issue enraging citizens. This paper summarizes the failure of change management practices during the implementation of the Information System used to run the operations of Department of Motor Vehicle in the state of Nevada, USA. The Nevada DMV was in the process of moving from old-style mainframe-based computing environment to the state-of-art client-server architecture. However the new Nevada DMV information system resulted in confusion and inconvenience to the citizenry of the state by creating problems such as 5-hour waiting time for driver's license renewal among others. This paper posits that the failure of adopting the adequate change management policy was the root cause of this problem. This study analyzes the development and implementation stages of the system using only publicly available information. The analysis of the public record supports the proposition that the change management using the method called "direct cutover" was the wrong choice.

1. INTRODUCTION

Hirschhorn (2000) identifies that the success of change management programs has more to do with execution than with conceptualization and successful change programs have one thing in common: They employ 3 distinct linked campaigns--political, marketing, and military. The execution part should involve political support gaining from customers, marketing to obtain employee's support, and military-style precise and well-planned execution of the change. All three aspects should be considered at the same time to achieve successful change. In changing an information system of an organization, this principle also applies. To gain political support, it is imperative for customers who receive service through the information system to be satisfied.

To gain supports from employees who operate the information system, it is critical to provide good educational program to ease the burden of learning a new system. To implement the new information system well, it is essential to have a detailed plan on how to conduct the system transition. The subject organization of this paper failed to gain political support due to poorer performance of the new system. In addition it didn't sufficiently educate employees on how to run the new system and military campaign to execute the change was careless and the wrong method of system transition was used. Converting from one IT environment to another needs careful strategy since many precious data and critical operations are affected.

The conversion, often called "cutover" can be done in several different ways. Palvia et al. (1991) summarized cutover strategies into four methods as following:

* Direct Cutover: cutting over at once from the existing system to the new system abandoning the old system completely right away.

* Parallel: running the existing system in parallel with the new system until complete conversion is accomplished.

* Phased: cutting over from the existing system to the new system in phases; one module system at a time; partial conversion happens gradually until all modules are replaced.

* Pilot: cutting over to a new system in one department of the organization and only after obtaining confidence in the new system, conversion is applied to other departments of the organization.

They suggested that the determination of which strategy was adequate for the given organization's conversion depended on three factors: system size, timing, and target organization size.

For example, when the organization is very large and all departments do not need to do conversion simultaneously, pilot cutover could be a good strategy since the organization can have enough time and opportunity to take care of any problem that might be caused by the transition. However if the entire organization needs to use the new system at the same time, pilot strategy is not desirable. If the system could be implemented in module by module style, Phased strategy can be used to ensure smooth transition from the old system to the new one, which gives enough time and opportunity to fix any problems originated from cutting over process as in the pilot strategy case. When the system should be implemented altogether at the same time in the entire organization, the risk of running into unexpected bugs during transition period is very high. If the organization doesn't have to put the information system in service 24 hours everyday, parallel strategy is the method to adopt since when the unexpected bug is found in the new system, the organization always can resort to the old one which is still running. This backup ability makes sure that system-down or slowing the service of the information system to clients should not happen. Unfortunately some organizations find maintaining the old system together with the new system impossible due to technical reasons such as incompatibility of different databases as well as extra cost of maintaining the old system.